


dryad

by annnubis



Series: in the shallows [2]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Body Horror, Captivity, F/M, Psychological Horror, Torture, and just a smidge of unwilling fascination, fragmentation of self like whoa, memory and time and the glinting knife of terror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22039036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annnubis/pseuds/annnubis
Summary: He stares at her coldly, some bizarre amalgamation of disappointed and savoring, and says, “Remember that a broken vow is paid for in flesh.”Captured by John's Chosen, Rook is determined to survive him even as she loses track of the days.
Relationships: Deputy | Judge/John Seed, Female Deputy | Judge/John Seed, John Seed & Reader, John Seed/Reader
Series: in the shallows [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586275
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	dryad

**Author's Note:**

> A prequel to faun, so it'll make more sense if you read faun first, but I'm not the boss of you so do whatcha want.
> 
> A few things: it's in present tense unlike the actual story, this will be in two parts, I know very very little about police academy programs, and please take the graphic depictions of violence warning seriously.

To my daughter I will say,

'when the men come, set yourself on fire.'

In Love and In War, Warsan Shire

She doesn’t know quite what she expected upon waking with the horribly familiar buzz of Bliss blurring the edges of her vision and numbing the tips of her fingers, but it is definitely within the approximation of being tied to a chair in a dimly lit room in front of a table clearly meant for instruments of torture. 

Across from her, though, is her former coworker and _that_ is a surprise. Hudson is a colleague she’d only just been getting to know. A woman she’d grown to genuinely like, for how quietly compassionate and reserved she is. Hudson’s eyes look like they haven’t been dry in a long time, tear tracks gleaming in the low gloom even from across the room, down her cheeks and over the tape across the lower half of her face. 

They make eye contact, the reverberation of it almost audible to June, like a bone being pushed back into its socket. It hurts, but it hurts in the way something lost returning to her hurts. 

_Thank god_ , June thinks, tearing up. _Thank Allah. Thank anyone and anything, the trees and the sky, that she is alright._

An acquaintance and a coworker, but a lovely one. Someone she might have grown close to, if not for all this madness from Eden’s Gate. 

“Sorry,” she greets, croaking through a dry throat, “I showed up late to the party. Thought it was fashionable. Guess I was wrong.”

Hudson’s eyes crinkle like she wants to smile and she cries a little harder. She isn’t okay. She isn’t okay, but she has both arms and both legs and both eyes and that feels like a miracle. 

It's a relief to see her alive, but honestly she’d give anything to have her fingers sifting through Peaches’ sandy fur, to hear the powerful thrum of the big cat’s pleased burr. 

“Things aren’t okay out there,” she confides to Hudson, “I’m sure you figured that. The cult’s taken over everything. It doesn’t matter how many I kill. They just keep _coming_.”

Her voice cracks at the last word, something manic driving deep fissures into it. Hudson leans forward against the ropes restraining her, her dark eyes flickering back and forth between June’s. 

Just a month ago, June hadn’t ever shot her gun at another person. It hadn't yet been required of her this early in her career. She'd been very lucky--up until she hadn't. Up until none of them were lucky because the men and women in the forests were shooting bullets and arrows and throwing nasty Molotov cocktails at anything that moved.

Hudson shakes her head. In horror, she thinks, or in horrified sympathy. It feels disbelieving and upset. Strange and consoling. 

“Every one of these Seed fuckers has a bunker. And basically their own militia. We’re outnumbered and they’ve been pumping drugs into the water, Hud.”

Hudson doesn’t look as surprised at that and that is probably what breaks June a little bit. 

“Y’all knew,” she shakes her head, “I know I’m new and new people don’t get told everything. But why didn’t you tell me more about The Project?”

Her response is wet blinking. Water gathering in eyes already swollen from moisture. Her response from her ex-partner is shame and it burns to know she has humiliated a woman who’s been a captive for weeks and weeks.

“I’m sorry,” June says, “Fuck, I’m so sorry. You don’t need this. But I didn’t fucking _know._ I didn’t fucking know and look at what they’ve made me.”

-

When she first learns to shoot, it's because her dad digs an old BB gun out of the attic. She’s just shy of her thirteenth birthday. It is winter, colder than it has any right to be and she's bored as all get out without school to keep her occupied. She’s just finished reading Jane Austen’s _Emma_ and doesn't have the concentration to begin another novel. 

“There’s nothing to do and I’m _so bored_ ,” she complains to her father after he arrives home from work and begins tugging off his steel toe boots without fully unlacing them. 

His lips twitch as he slides off his socks and replies, “Hasn’t anyone ever told you if you’re bored then you’re boring, darlin’?”

Neither of her parents had ever bothered to hang anything but the thinnest, lightest of curtains on the windows in the living room and she frowns at him in the light-flooded room. 

“Your face is boring,” she shoots back and is gratified when he laughs. It doesn’t happen a lot, her quiet father more likely to crack a smile out the corner of his mouth than to laugh full-on. It’s a precious thing.

His smile fades, but he looks soft and approachable as he says, "I might have something for you."

It’s November, chilly for Alabama, and he slips her coat sleeves up her arms, bundles her up like a child unused to cold, and ushers her out into the backyard where there's no fence, just open green space that edges up against woods. The landscape is emerald, full of evergreens. The sky is clearer than glass and the cold surrounding them is humid, the sort of lingering humidity that never truly leaves Birmingham no matter the season.

He lets her line up aluminum Seven Up cans on an old stump at the edge of their property and wraps his big arms around her as he helps her ready her shot. He’s never been a man to own guns, but he’s always believed in her knowing she can do anything. The BB gun is an opportunity he doesn't want her to miss, the way he wants her to do better than him and be better than him. Live a better, easier life where she doesn't work herself to exhaustion trying to make rent and electricity.

She'll be college-bound in no time, something he never achieved and wants for her so badly, but even so he'll be damned if she doesn't know how to work with her hands.

He smells like coffee and car grease and his bomber jacket has stains in it that don’t come out after multiple washings and she wants to be here, in this backyard with him with the chill stinging the apples of her cheeks, suspended in his embrace as long as he'll let her. 

The back door opens behind them right before she can take her first shot and she hears a shuffling of long skirts, the fullness of movement registering behind her. 

An accented voice rings out, inquiring and amused and outraged, “What are you doing with my daughter, Peter?”

Juniper turns her head to the side to catch the woman out of the corner of her eye. She is a woman cloaked in sun, with it positioned directly behind her head in a beaming, auroral halo. 

She grins wolfishly at her mother, turns back around, and pulls the trigger. 

-

She comes to leaning against the back wall of an abandoned gas station, Peaches' soft, tawny head resting solid and loyal on her thigh as if standing guard while she’d been too fucked up to function. She's petting the cougar, mouthing frantic words she feels herself speaking but can't understand at all.

Gibberish attempting to be words or English too saturated in desperation to understand, she doesn't know. It spews out of her in a putrid stream of panic until she finally clamps it shut and staggers to her feet to find adequate shelter for them.

Since she regained consciousness, Juniper and Peaches are merely been living one day to the next. She’s liberated nothing since Faith's region, though Dutch comes over the airwaves strong as ever whenever she tunes into the radio she’d found in that gas station. 

_Kid, I’m hoping you’re alright. Last I heard you were in the Henbane where I think even fuckin’ demons fear to tread. All I can figure is you escaped into Holland Valley...got my fingers crossed, at least. When you hear this, ping me on the usual channel...got a job for you, if you’re up for it_ , says his grandfatherly, crackling voice. 

It has been days and he’s been sending the same message. The warmth of his confidence in her is only dampened by the endless nature of the calling she’s been tasked with. The blood dried permanently underneath her fingernails is something she hasn’t grown accustomed to. 

She doesn’t think she has it in her to take another life right now.

She’s yet to respond to Dutch. Hasn’t even gone into town. She doesn’t feel human enough to show her face in Fall’s End, not after losing all her guns and then bludgeoning dozens of peggies with a shovel crossing from Faith's region to John's territory. Mary and Jerome have been kind to her, but she feels nauseous when she thinks of looking at their heads. It’s sick, the way human heads look like targets lately, with her aiming for a bulls-eye every time, simply an object to ruin until it no longer pursues her on eager, murderous feet.

June doesn't want to see her friends and acquaintances that way.

She would have tried to meet up with them eventually, she knows, because the idea of spending the rest of her life alone in the wild country of Hope is frightening. June is not made to be a loner; it's a role she's been coerced into.

But she isn't alone for long.

John’s Chosen ambush their campsite when Peaches is out hunting dinner, having butted their heads together in parting and slipping into the underbrush with a neat flick of her tail not thirty minutes before. 

They must have been tracking her for some time--probably since she had stumbled straight from Faith’s territory into John’s a week ago in a miasmic haze of imagined, moaning bodies grabbing at her as if they were trying to pull her into the underworld, scratching at her skin and clothes like ghostly-limbed quicksand. 

She knows most of it was real. She killed a lot of people to cross the border, shadow and flesh alike falling under her determination to make it to the other side alive.

It was really the voices that came to her from the Bliss, the beloved lost voices of the past that nibbled at her heels like rats, that had kept her hands shaking for hours after she’d come down. Juniper has tried to swallow all the memories she has of her life before Hope in an attempt to protect them, but she is unraveling too badly to protect even herself after the Bliss has had her in its grasp.

Now the chance to reconnect with her allies has been taken from her. 

She’s only glad Peaches is away when she’s taken. Juniper doesn’t think she has the mental fortitude to watch those animals slaughter the most dependable friend she’s had since she moved to Montana. That cat is like a goddamn family member, having waded through deep water and searing tongues of fire and just plain, broken bodies they’ve both felled in order to keep moving forward. Wordlessly, Peaches has taken on June's burden as if it is theirs to share and something would shatter irrevocably inside her to see such a proud creature put down in an unfair fight.

So she’s glad, even with a throbbing knot swelling on the back of her head as she eyes Hudson and her thinly veiled panic. Even feeling how the rope knotted around her arms chafes them with every unthinking movement.

Even in a bunker that seems only to have an entrance and no exit. 

-

The metal door that must be located behind her groans with the straining movement of its own weight as it pushes open. Solid, striding footsteps sound and then John Seed comes into view. Abrupt, lurching bends in his knees as he walks into the room and up to her bound form.

“Hello,” John greets her, speculatively, grabbing her by the chin and turning it side to side, “I’d requested you to be gagged. Looks like somebody forgot how to follow orders, doesn’t it.”

It's not a question.

His voice is smooth and easy and seems to be holding an awful lot of unspoken malice. Juniper has no doubt he’ll be revisiting the topic of the forgotten gag with his Chosen very soon. Despite his tone, he hasn't come to play.

He's as close to her as he insisted upon being at the river when he'd threatened to rip out her sins. Last time, there’d been fireflies lit up around them like refulgent, twinkling stars and she’d almost blacked out after her involuntary cleansing. Joseph Seed had issued his ultimatum that John either make her Atone or lose out on the cult’s new, sinless world. 

John leaves her ungagged despite his annoyance.

He gives her and Hudson an alarming monologue about his personal philosophy after that. Leaning against his workbench with a relaxed posture, he lets her look her terrified fill of him. The open vee of his button down displays a gruesome scar, stricken through roughly, offering her a glimpse of the brutality chiseled into him.

His hands are big and inked, faded but no softer for it. He's tattooed practically everywhere, most heavily down his arms and hands and normally she'd be fascinated by body art and the stories tattoos tell. Mostly, as she watches him work himself up into a keen anger and Hudson thrashes across the room, she's horrified.

She's read the _Book of Joseph_. Once she realized there was fucking _literature_ produced by their group and it was written by Joseph the one true blah-blah-blah, she'd gotten her hot little hands on their Word the first chance she got. Big brother Joseph had written about John's job as a well-to-do lawyer. How he'd grown up in wealth and luxury, the only brother who became an educated and successful man, and while he looks at least semi-intelligent and entitled as fuck--there is nothing out of place about him in the ugly, earthy room she has found herself in. 

He is grotesque, a burning tongue in a statue's smooth, ivory face. 

He is charismatic, despite the smarmy video he’d made to threaten her not long after Dutch saved her life. Maybe it’s because he still looks so affected by his wounds, and reverent of them, and bitter over the sources of his pain.

Unlike aloof Jacob, beseeching Faith, and poisonous Joseph, John is not interested in a pedestal so much being elbow-deep in the pain and revelation of the people around him. Like a man compelled to handle electricity at every opportunity, there is something in his eyes that is shooting out of him like steel traps pried open and ready to ensnare.

He is trying desperately, she thinks in trepidation, to connect to something. Anything. And that's what makes him a true threat, hardly anyone except some freak with a man-bun tethering him in his search.

John looks like he's dragging the words by barbarous hooks from his esophagus as he scrapes out, “You will swim across an _ocean of pain_ and emerge...free.”

There is a strange echo of sound behind his words that rush up not to drown him out, but to amplify him. She squints her eyes, worried that she’s hallucinating. The sound is somewhere between rushing water and something old and dear--something precious, something ghostly and feminine. Something clean, so incongruent from the orange light cradled by antlers and the metal grating of the walls, the rusty swing of a single ceiling fan. 

_What are you doing with my daughter, Peter?_ it asks, laughing.

A woman’s voice, but it's gone fast and she is left in the gaping absence of warmth. Like medicine has been held to her lips and taken away as soon as she seeks to receive it.

She blinks, the noise dissipating, and hears him ask who will confess first. But he’s only looking at her, while Hudson shrieks and screams like a wild horse at his back. The other woman looks crazed, like her soul has drained out of her and onto the floor and there is little left but a loud hollow nothingness. Juniper is scared. June is terrified, honestly, and numb and buzzing--but she doesn’t feel crazy yet, not the way Hudson looks.

So, after a tense silence, Juniper swallows and nods her head. A gasp sticks in her throat like a pebble. 

“Me,” she rasps.

John smiles.

-

He blindfolds her and tips her chair over on its side so that her arms and legs lean uncomfortably against her restraints. Her cheek presses against the grimy concrete floor and June tries very hard to ignore how many layers of filth and blood and suffering is making contact with her face. Two weeks ago she had begun a campaign to destroy Faith Seed's creepy shrines; now she's no better than a lion in a cage.

Out there, she didn't have to think about anything except the next mission, everything around her stinking like gun powder or fresh like the cloying smell of weeds. But in here, there is entirely too much room for her thoughts to unclog while she lays prostrate at the cult's feet. 

What can keep her safe, now her arms are bound? Now her legs are anchored? She's a weapon sheathed and her waiting mind rushes in to saturate her in fear, in hopes of protecting her somehow. She wishes her identity, her essence and soul, would sit quietly until she's safe enough to claim it again. She's been repeating to herself that if she just keeps her head down and keeps moving, if she just beats the cult at its own sick game and saves every single person she comes across, then--

Then she can take back herself. Become a person again.

She can be a person worth knowing, like she used to be, if only those few little things are taken care of.

Instead, John Seed is going to rip her apart at his leisure.

He leaves, wheeling Hudson past her with measured steps, and when he returns he merely rights her chair and sits on the stool he’d dragged right in front of her, so close that they are sharing breaths. 

John says, “I think we can make this work, deputy. Why don’t you take a little nap first while I get everything ready?”

June isn’t surprised when he hits her with a shot of Bliss, which she hates more than anything, but she is surprised when he doesn’t immediately get up to prepare for her little confession appointment.

He watches as she goes under instead, leaning into her face, so near she can see a few faint freckles on his cheeks. The aquiline bridge of his pale nose. His lips part, eyes unearthly and luminous, like he has all the time in the world to watch her succumb to darkness.

-

She's eating dinner with her parents at Asha's, a Greek and Lebanese place they've taken her to since she was a little girl, because she and Bahar can agree on nothing else. Bahar refuses to eat raw fish so sushi is never an option and June gags at the thought of lasagna so Italian is out. Peter says nothing and waits for them to settle on something.

Greek food can always be counted as an acceptable compromise. They decide on Asha's and make the ten minute drive from their house, all three of them piled in her father's beat-up F150, Juniper sitting between them fiddling with the radio the whole way.

They walk in and are there for hardly a minute before being seated by Mr. Hakim, the night manager. It's their usual spot in the far back corner of the restaurant, a table June can remember coloring on as a child, and they put in an appetizer order for shrimp ladled in garlicky butter sauce and pita bread.

It's a rare night when neither Bahar nor Peter are anxious over bills or worried over work, relaxed as they are through the shoulders. No skin pulling tight in stress around their eyes. In their ease and good cheer is an opportunity and so Juniper asks them all the questions she wants about anything she can think of. 

Usually, in moments like these she asks about Bahar's past. There's so much you can't know, when half your family lives in another country and your mother is tight-lipped about her life on a good day.

"What did your dad do, mom?" she asks softly, afraid of a rebuttal but unwilling to lose the chance to have one mystery solved.

Her mother answers easily, as if she is never reluctant to comment on her life before Alabama, "Well, Junie, his father owned fruit orchards out in the country, but my father moved to the city to go to college. He became a lawyer, something of a famous one, too. He was well-known in Tehran."

"What was he like?"

"Like any man--impatient, demanding," she answers immediately, almost harshly, then pats Peter's knee as he bites into hot pita, "Except for your father, of course."

"Mmhmm," her fathers hums in amusement, brows raised, and places his enormous palm over hers.

"Smart man," Juniper chuckles, eyes flickering between them.

"Yes," Bahar comments with immense satisfaction, re-adjusting a rich purple, paisley shawl about her narrow shoulders, "He really is. Nothing like my father."

"Good thing, too," Peter says, succinct as the day he was born, and excuses himself to the bathroom. As he walks past, he briefly squeezes June's shoulder, a wordless gesture of love that seems to come naturally to him. A languages he speaks to her as easy as breathing.

Bahar notices the touch and her daughter's quiet, simple smile, her black eyes sharp and bright like a fox's upon ensnaring a rabbit. She is a woman of bottomless silences and quick, fierce joys.

"Part of the reason I married your father was because I could tell he'd be an excellent parent," she confides unexpectedly, " _My_ father was a repulsive man and I hope his death is a prolonged, painful one because it's what he deserves. Peter can give you what I never had."

There is a familiar static, some untouchable grief that has made its home inside Bahar which Juniper can sense like hunger or thirst or shivering cold--it's instinctive, how she can see below her mother's surface to the silhouette of some huge mass, but be unable to grasp it. And it is a shame--that Bahar will not explain it or absolve it and it remains like a gaping divide between them.

"Would you ever want to talk about it?"

Bahar looks at her evenly and replies, "Why would I want to talk about something I will never be able to forget? Tell me what the point of that would be."

Juniper absorbs the enormity of the response and bites her lip, says, "To make you feel better, mom."

Her mother smiles a little, a veneer for a private bitterness she has nursed for many years, "What will make me feel better is when you get your degree. I want you to be educated and fall in love with an educated man and lead a normal, happy life. That will make me feel better."

"Cheers to that," says her father, just returning to the table to catch the end of the conversation.

Juniper is still watching her mother who is looking down at her plate, somewhere else entirely; somewhere she can't reach her. Somewhere Bahar cannot escape.

Juniper swallows and takes a sip of her Sprite, forces a smile to say, "Cheers. How else will I be able to afford to give you two a retirement full of luxury and refinement when you're old and decrepit?"

Peter sets down the pita bread he'd just grabbed to cock his head at her, light and playful, and he says, "Now hold on one god-dang minute. No one said anything about decrepit."

They all laugh and eat dinner and talk, a memory of a July night far away from her now. It's a memory she has relived over and over again in her lowest moments here--the burning fingers Joseph Seed used to seize her wrist after the helicopter went down, the first time she shot a man through the head and how the bullet sounded like puncturing a hot air balloon, how she killed a deer in the forest after two days of starving and though she'd given up anything but seafood in her teens she skinned it badly and hacked off meat to roast over a campfire.

Unlike any of those remembrances, this time her mother is at the table laughing at something her father says, but then she turns to look at June without any expression on her young, lovely face. The noise dies away and she can detect no movement from anyone in the restaurant, as if all has fallen away but the face of Bahar.

What's happening?

"Men are impatient," her mother reminds her firmly, which is most definitely not part of the memory, and her eyes are more serious than June's ever seen them, "And they are demanding. These are not personality traits, my love--they are weaknesses."

-

She comes awake screaming because John fucking Seed decides a reasonable wake-up call is a sucker punch to the kidney. Her ankles push at the bristly ropes binding them. He looks vindicated, like he’s getting his due for some imagined wrong she’s done him. 

Almost immediately, she quells the scream and clamps her mouth shut. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction. She must have slept, but she’s exhausted--all-night exhausted, layover-in-Houston exhausted, exhausted like she spent a night in a hospital waiting room chair. 

John chuckles pleasantly, dressed today in a simple blue henley and dark jeans. His scar is covered and his hair is loose, free of product. He looks very after-hours, as her father would say when he was home from the plant without his uniform on as he slummed it in sweatpants and a Roll Tide t-shirt. 

If Juniper was feeling talkative, she would ask him if he was off the clock as an evil cult leader. If she’s a little pet project he has on the side. As it is, she keeps her lips sealed and her eyes trained on him. 

Bahar and Peter, her mother and father arguing over the last piece of pita without any bite to their words, her younger self dressed in capri jeans and some old band t-shirt from Hot Topic--they are all receding in the background now that she's awake, closer to the surface than they've been in some time.

Her mother's warning especially echoes through her head.

John is observing her like an interesting puzzle. It's nerve wracking. It's loathsome.

The hand she’d grown used to petting Peaches with whenever she was feeling anxious itches and she clenches it reflexively. John watches it all happen, her waking and her silence and her twitching hand, with the inscrutable gaze of a man watching a mouse caught in a trap. 

He muses, “Yes, that’s your natural inclination, isn’t it, deputy? That instinctive violence that rises like spring water from a hole in the ground. It’s an understandable response for you to want to hit me.”

Concentrating, she can feel the sleek fur running over her palm if she focuses hard enough, like sifting her fingers through a bag of rice. The heat Peaches gives off, as warm as a cup of chamomile tea cupped in cold hands, comes to her effortlessly. The Peaches in her head is comforting and unyielding in her devotion. Weeks of living like a refugee, coming across blood smears and bodies as often as spotting cardinals high in the pines, and she needs the safety that comes with losing herself to the memory of her cougar.

She needs someone on her side, aware that the Resistance has made her the mermaid figurehead on the bow of their warship and offered their friendship _after_ she massacres scores of their enemies. That they pick off the stragglers, but she is the grunt on the ground facing a never-ending wall of cultists alone. That she is alone within the hostility of the heart of Eden’s Gate. 

And here is John Seed, watching her like the rest, like he knows the whole of her. Knows her at all. He thinks she wants to bust his face in; she wants to pet her cat. 

“I know the violence, the need to rise up against your enemies,” John needles, “But we are not your enemies. Not me or my brothers and sisters.”

He comes closer. Peaches has warm eyes and warm skin and she is a comfort when they both have to sleep on the hard ground. June hopes she’s safe, hasn’t tracked her to John’s Gate where there are too many guns for her to overcome despite her ferocity. 

And, a mere whisper in her mind, she also conjures up the image of her mother wrapped in that purple, paisley shawl. She imagines Bahar and Peaches in a meadow of flowers, beckoning her to sprint out to them from the treeline. Fuck, she misses them. 

She wasn't made to be an island.

When John is mere inches away, she flinches, averts her gaze. Bound, she has no capability of retaliating and John has shown himself to be someone who cannot be predicted.

Who looks calm until he isn't.

“I’m not your enemy, deputy,” John tells her, “But I _am_ your confessor. You have to trust me. You gave me affirmation and that’s the first step, but you have to achieve penance. The only way is through the act of acknowledgement.”

He stares at her, his brow becoming more brooding and expectant for every second she isn’t speaking. 

“You have to accept the consequences of your actions,” he tells her, “You must follow through on your choices and, make no mistake, _I will hold you accountable_.”

Without warning, he punches her again. She sputters and groans, though she tries to dampen the pitiful sound.

He stares at her coldly, some bizarre amalgamation of disappointed and savoring, and says, “Remember that a broken vow is paid for in flesh.”

She can feel the bruises forming in phases: the red irritated skin deepening into deeper colors, a rash of broken blood vessels rising fitfully, pulsating. 

She looks around the room, unused to its trappings. She’s traveled extensively over Hope and it continues to be a surprise when she sees something she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams. John’s Gate is a tumor on the valley where it resides. She knows the farmland here, has feathered cool fingers over the tips of cabbage and kale and lettuce, abandoned as the cult took the farmers and their spouses and their children, but his bunker has been a shadowy mystery looming over her since the Reaping.

Juniper has squatted in defiled houses and beneath trees that seem tall enough to graze heaven's floor. She has slept in barns stripped of their expensive equipment for the growing seasons, ransacked as if overgrown children threw tantrums and tore the place apart.

It’s not far from the truth. 

But John’s bunker, after her time living off the land and crouching in its tall grass and shrubbery, is like everything else she learns about the Seeds: something she doesn't truly begin to understand until they take her. Until they wrap her in rhetoric so harsh on her ears that they chafe. 

When John beats her, it’s then that she remembers the land is not hers. Was never hers. The broccoli and squash and tomatoes will suck nutrients from the earth and fill their tapering roots with rainwater without her; and John will still be here, whether she lives or dies, laughing in his self assured way as he strips weak flesh from weaker bone.

-

"You see, deputy, you're going to have to talk if this whole thing is going to work," John tells her conversationally, standing in front of her yanking her head back by a fist of hair. She can feel individual strands pulling at the roots in her scalp. 

She huffs a laugh that doesn't signify laughter and gasps, "I am talking."

John grits his teeth and yanks again.

"Don't play stupid," he chides, any semblance of stability knocked loose from his intent stare. She can't help but stare back, though she'd meant to find a dent or stain in the wall to fixate on.

Juniper imagines John must rebuke people all the time. If John's chapter in the cult's holy book is to be believed and his rant at the outset of her captivity is to be taken with no grain of salt, he has been on the table for dissection his whole childhood. 

Only now does he stand on the other side of the counter, so to speak.

"They must have told you that all the time," she says softly. And she really does want to know because he, in turn, has knocked loose her terror. It's transmuted into something that incorporates terror, but is something else entirely. 

He topples her chair by a callous wrench of her dark, thick hair, releasing her and watching her raise her head up enough to miss direct contact with the floor but not far enough to sprain her neck once the impact of collision runs through her body. As far as tactical landings go, it's shit. It hurts.

But it's enough to avoid permanent damage and a concussion, though, and she's left huffing and heaving but generally intact.

John leans over grabs her again by the hair and slowly, agonizingly, picks her and the chair up and returns her to her previous position. The pain whites out her vision and turns it red and she keeps forgetting to breathe because it feels like someone is pouring acid over her scalp.

He snarls, "Tsk, tsk, nameless sinner. If you ever want to feel the wings of salvation sweep you from your accrued filth, from this slaughterhouse floor--if you ever want to know the adoration of light crowning your head like a halo when you accept the Father and depart from this trial anew, then you will learn how to divulge."

"I don't want wings," she replies, shaking her head, "Too heavy."

He laughs and it sounds like a circling carrion cawing above roadkill sizzling on tarmac. 

"So blind," he judges her, "Tell me, have you ever known the transcendent power of absolution?"

Juniper cannot help but think of a mother who could have gone toe to toe with this man. Peter in his work clothes slugging him in the jaw. Peaches raking her claws through his eyeballs.

He has never known what she has. Never.

She spits at him, "Better than you. Better than the people you own, beating their chests and torturing families in the woods. You think that pain is transformative...I understand why you would need to think that after what happened to you, but you're wrong. It's as futile a prescription as it is a tool."

June keeps bringing up what has been written about his life because she wants to gauge what happens when someone other than him does it. Far from the man who rhapsodized on finding the word Yes after being assaulted on a kitchen floor, he's infuriated. Insulted. Looking to hurt her.

"I have head tales of your bullets and arrows sliding through men and women's foreheads like butter knives. You're a demon among Eden's flock, a shadow that follows children into their dreams. You must convert, but not in your current form. It would be a disgrace to those who came before you."

"Those people are under the delusion that the apocalypse is coming and talk in hushed tones about the fucking Reaping, which is a murder-fest moonlighting as a spiritual holiday. _They_ are nightmares...and I've found your handy work, too, John Seed. You've got a real flair for making a statement, dangling corpses by their ankles. Humiliating, senseless deaths that can never be undone."

"You don't know humiliation yet, deputy, but you will. I'll have to strip you to the marrow and the muscle to get you to come clean," he threatens, kicking her chair lightly and making it roll back a few inches.

It's a warning. She doesn't respond well to those.

She retorts, "Nothing to come clean about. Nothing a poor, little, rich boy who grew into a raving psychopath could help me with, anyhow."

To her surprise, he gathers her hair in his hands and parts it from the back, draping the pieces over her shoulders so that they tumble down her chest.

"I'm going to enjoy it," he says, watching as her face tightens with apprehension, "Breaking you."

-

Her mother doesn’t want her to go into law enforcement. She’s as subtle as a guard dog confronting an intruder and unfortunately Juniper was cut from the same cloth of stubbornness, and they’ve had fights that feel like they shake the earth over it. 

After June finishes college with her bachelor’s, she moves back home just to start working reception for a dentist’s office upon realizing not everyone is chomping at the bit to hire a woman who's most impressive skill is her ability to tear through books like a tornado. Her humanities degree was wonderful and meant that she’d read extensively throughout her undergraduate degree, but it isn’t very marketable and none of her field-adjacent interviews have panned out.

When she sees the police school ad in the paper as her father passes her the comics section of _The Birmingham News_ at breakfast one morning, she remembers Peter's old BB gun in her hands and thinks, _I could do that._

It turns out that not everyone feels the same way about that topic. It turns out no one actually expected her to follow through on her idea to go into law enforcement, not until she's signed up and in the first week of her program.

“I don’t want you to,” her mother says stiffly. When she’s scared or angry she hardly blinks, a fearsome woman who stares at you like she might smite you from creation if you say the wrong thing. 

“Well, I do. I don’t want to be a receptionist forever,” she says, knowing there’s too much plea, too much give in her voice--there always is, she has never quite managed to stamp it out--and that Bahar will scent it like a shark sensing blood in water.

Her father refuses to join the conversation, instead peeling shrimp for paella in the kitchen. Her mother is seated next to her on their yellow couch as they argue, the late afternoon light casting them in prisms of amber and pine honey. Bahar is particularly beautiful, slender and golden and ready for a fight.

She looks away from her magazine and cuts a sidelong look at Juniper, and says, matter-of-fact, “Then maybe you should have become a doctor like I told you to.”

“That’s not going to help me now, is it?” asks June, matching her dry tone. The police academy has been no walk in the park and there's so much left to learn. 

Maybe her mom’s right and she should have gone into medicine like every other good Iranian-American kid the country. Or maybe she's overprotective to the point of being controlling sometimes--specifically when reality does not match her vision of how the world should work.

Neither of them get up from the couch, but they fall silent and don’t really talk again until that Sunday when June crawls into bed with her, a child still in the way her mother fears for her and her father dotes on her, and she slips her cool hand into her mother’s warm one where it lies beneath the covers. 

Fingers squeeze hers, grip lingering, and a seed of clemency is planted. Unassuming. Reluctant. Profoundly felt. 

“There's no safety in your future if you do this,” comes Bahar's sleep-soft voice, far more temperate and forthcoming when she is half-asleep and unguarded within the safety of her bedroom than she is outside of it.

June concedes, wiggling closer, “I know, mom.”

Her mother rolls onto her side to face Juniper and peeks her eyes open before letting them close again, as if she just wants to make sure her daughter was exactly where she should be.

She says, “You’re supposed to start your life now. Not give yourself to such a violent career.”

“I’m training so I can do some good in the world. And it’s not like I’m dead.”

Juniper nuzzles her head into her father’s pillow, in the indent where he always sets his, feeling like she is walking a path where she places her footsteps directly into the ones he’s left behind. But he is only in the kitchen, putting on coffee, and there is no need to think about a time when he won’t be. 

Her mother persists, though, because it’s safe to talk in the space between them, like they are a parentheses in which they can fill a secret understanding arising from their astonishing similarities and their painful differences, how their black hair can break a comb and they are night owls and how they can never agree on what to eat for dinner.

She murmurs, “Don't you want to fall in love?”

Juniper feels a shock run through her. Her mother is of the opinion that everyone’s feelings are their own, has never prodded where she may not be welcome when it comes to this subject.

But a warmth rushes right after it and chokes her up. It’s no hardship to be honest.

“No,” she answers tenderly after a long pause, as if that one word is a flower she’s tucking behind Bahar’s small ear.

She could say more about how scary the idea of dating is to her soft heart, how she has more to do before she can think about finding someone, how all the love she needs is in this house. All of them together, a close-knit little unit.

But she doesn't get the chance.

Bahar has already fallen back asleep.

-

When the accident happens, she's just completed her training with the police academy and is out celebrating with her fellow trainees at a pub downtown.

It's a rainy night when someone takes a sloppy, drunken left turn in front of incoming traffic and her parents' Camry is crushed by the gigantic Chevy Silverado that slams into it. Her mother dies instantly upon impact and Juniper is almost thankful because the front of their vehicle eventually catches fire and spreads to her legs before her body is pulled from the car, half-charred and smelling of roasting meat.

Peter lives--if you can call it living.

Her father looks asleep--for all intents and purposes, he _is_ asleep--and he just never wakes ups. Lost somewhere in his mind and left in a hospital where she spends most of her afternoons from then on patting his sun-tanned arms that get paler from lack of sun, away from his plant job, and stroking the lines on his palms, looking for a sign that she hasn't been completely abandoned.

She doesn't find anything in his life line and eventually she focuses on his vitality line, how curving and robust it is because he is someone who can never stand still. He's taught her to cook and shoot and not take her mother's intentional and unintentional cutting remarks so seriously.

Bahar was a sun at an unflinching eclipse every second of the day; her father is the air around her, softer than a hummed lullaby. Softer, eventually, than the grief that ensconces her in an invisible, filigree shroud.

 _What is that old saying_ , she thinks, _One breath for sorrow, two for joy._

It doesn't hold true for her. Joy has no place in her childhood home where no one tinkers with old cars or hems shirts as the evening news plays. Despite graduating from the academy, she stays on at her receptionist job because all the fight has left her. She can't move. She won't.

One month passes. Then two. Then a year. A year and a half, and her father is in a hospice where the workers are attentive to him and especially sweet to her. She's young and polite and she has a baby face, a dimple that puckers when she smiles and clear silky skin, which she thinks must endear her to the wizened, older women who run the care center.

Her father's attendants, Arlene and Sandra, always hug her in greeting when they see her, extended motherly embraces that leave her stricken and yearning.

She turns 25 at his bedside, having taken the day off from scheduling teeth cleanings to read him a Faulkner novel she never quite convinced him to pick up though she was sure he'd of liked it. 

_As I Lay Dying_ is perhaps a morbid choice to read aloud at the bedside of a coma patient, but above all she is sharing something with her father who is both here and not here and whose remnants are tucked under blue linen blankets and hooked to beeping machines. 

June swipes the book on her way out the door of her newly inherited childhood home and buys a red velvet cupcake from the bakery down the street to take with her on her visit.

Peter has an amazing life insurance policy, thankfully keeping his stay at the hospice fully funded for the next six months, but eventually she will bring him home to care for herself.

She wishes, for the hundredth or the thousandth or the millionth time, that her mother was here.

The only thing to do with her stifling despair is to continue reading; because Peter won't wake up and Bahar is ashes in a vase on their mantle and she refuses to let go of them.

She reads, "'Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear...'"

And Juniper thinks, _But what happens when love itself becomes a lack? What happens when love seizes you and widens into a void that turns anything that enters it into nothingness?_

Juniper thinks, _Come back. I don't know how to do this without you._

-

On what must be the third or fourth, she’s used to relieving herself in front of him. It’s vile, him listening to her piss while he’s keeping her locked in what amounts to a dungeon, but it’s better than urinating on herself. He’s let her sip water every so often, part of the irrefutable proof that Joseph may have been serious about converting her if he’s not totally ignoring her basic needs. 

Luckily, lack of food and her own stress have kept her from needing to defecate, but she guesses it’s only a matter of time. She’s trying not to think about it too hard because it’s hard enough to squat with him not a foot away holding a gun to her head. 

He starts talking like nothing horrible is happening and maybe that’s what sets her off.

“Today’s a new day, deputy,” he says, crisp and professional, “Today can be the day you truly begin to take a step towards the light.”

She’s so dehydrated that hardly any liquid trickles out of her, but she can still smell it. She’s always been sensitive to scents. Could hardly ever use Bath and Body Works or anything out of the Body Shop, no matter how appealing the lotions and potions sounded to her. And if something that’s supposed to smell good wreaks havoc on her, the smell of her own filthy body relieving itself is enough to make her gag. 

John Seed must be so used to people’s bodily fluids that he thinks nothing of continuing whatever the fuck monologue he’s gearing up for. Is this what drove Hudson nuts? This must be part of what drove Hudson nuts.

She swallows a couple of dry swallows, trying to work up the saliva to speak, “Maybe today is the day you learn to love me, John. We’ve all got our orders, haven’t we?”

Her voice is rusty and mangled, lack of water and excess of emotion clogging her throat, but the words come out, letting him know that she has not forgotten the encounter she has witnessed between him and his messiah.

At first John looks pleased that she’s talking, but by the end he’s clenching his jaw hard enough that the hinge of it dimples. 

_There's no safety in your future if you do this_ , whispers her mother's sleepy voice.

“Yes, we have,” he concedes, “It’s all for a higher purpose. You will talk and I...I will do what I must.”

Juniper grimaces and tells him, “Then you’ll never love me. I wonder what failure tastes like to you--metallic like blood in your mouth or bitter as a lemon?”

John rears back, a furrow between his eyebrows, eyes tethered to hers.

He's never looked at her like that before. 

He calms himself, blinks sedately at her as if he wants her to believe there wasn’t a moment of pause. She stands up as best she can over the bucket, her vision going black and her head tingly, and she pulls up her jeans. 

He gestures with the gun for her to go back to her chair and ties her up again before he deigns to respond.

“I will do what I must,” he repeats. Calm and in control, but it claws at her because it’s not real. He says, “And I won’t fail, my revelation can only lead you to the Father, now that I have you.”

“Do you?” she asks quietly, honestly, biting the inside of her lip against a tremble.

He tugs the knot at her ankles. He looks handsome up close whereas far away he’s just a pale, rabid man conducting an orchestra of chaos. He looks so alive and healthy--the hair in his beard is thick and dark and his ears are a bit pink amidst his light complexion. His throat is corded and strong, the outlines of his arms clear and curving. 

“Do I what?” he asks, finally looking at her. 

For once, he’s not viewing her through a fine glaze of fervor or an unbreachable veil or zealotry. He’s just looking at her. Maybe he’s surprised. Or maybe she’s doing everything he’s trying to get her to do right on time, like clockwork, breaking to his specifications down to the exact second.

Her ribs ache. Her head aches. Her stomach is bruised and shrunken.

“Do you have me?” she clarifies. It’s said more gently than she intends, closer to the person she was before Eden’s Gate brought down hell, closer to the person who wanted to understand _before_ she took action. 

Nothing like the mindless, limping thing she is now.

He doesn’t answer.

-

“You need a push, deputy,” he says slyly, returning after a very long time away from her, “A nudge in the right direction that I can provide.”

It must be another day, though Juniper thinks it has to be the fifth. Potentially the sixth. It’s all getting away from her: details, specifics, thoughts mushy and fragmented though she tries to think through the muffle of nutritional deficiency and sleeplessness and helplessness.

She cocks her head at him, can feel the crust at the corners of her eyes she can’t wipe and the sweat under her arms she can’t clean. 

“Joseph must be pressuring you to get this done already,” she muses. There’s no reason not to share this with him. They’re both thinking it. In fact, she wagers a guess that his thoughts are generally consumed by his brother’s decrees one way or another.

Something awful bites her and she yelps, wordlessly vocalizes the bright pain radiating from her leg. She looks down to see that he’s pushed a thumb tack he procured out of fucking nowhere into the meat of her left thigh, right on the top of it like he’s adding a button to her pants. It’s already bleeding a watercolor pool into the fabric of her jeans and it’s so dark the blood looks black.

Or maybe she’s become something else, after all the killing and captivity. Something new and twisted that’s decayed her down to the blood in her veins.

But not, she reminds herself, _not_ something his. She will have to become her own kind of monstrosity, if she is to become a monster. More of one, really.

“ _The Father_ ,” John corrects her, his mouth poised to spread into that blank and taunting grin he wears so often, “Since you’ve begun to jabber, I think the work we’ll do today will be in instructive linguistics, deputy. Don’t worry, we’ll wash all the bad words out of your mouth.”

Except the thin needle biting into her body isn’t soap. Except it hurts in such a specific and acute way. Except she’s becoming angry, the impotent fury rising up in her. Except he adds three more in quick succession as she yells. God, she’s so fucking tired and so fucking awake.

“And yet there’s no one to check yours, Baptist,” she counters, the first time she invokes his moniker. That is who she’s speaking to currently, the John Seed with tales of his frankly disturbing childhood and the cocky, open bend to his posture is absent.

He is filling a role. She is not interested in filling hers.

John asks her to confess a sin. Any sin. Did she ever steal a piece of candy from the supermarket when she was a little girl? Did ever lie about being sick so she could stay home from school?

She refuses to answer.

Another thumbtack, about an inch above the first. She chokes and cries out. It’s not a clean, easy sound, but thick and mucous-y and immediate. 

He looks frustrated before his expression shifts and he appears to her determined.

He slaps an open palm over the thumbtacks, jostling them inside her, and she almost bites deep into her tongue. 

Watching, he says, deadly and somber, “I warned you, didn’t I, that I would have to scrub your soul? That this would be difficult. And painful.”

It’s a chore to speak, as tangled as she is in her wounds, but she manages to say in willful misunderstanding, “You don’t look like you’re in pain.”

At first she thinks a moth has landed on her cheek, that it somehow got inside and traversed long snaking hallways and through a locked door just to land on her like a kiss. To alleviate her loneliness.

But it’s not. No. It's John swiping a slow thumb underneath her eye, gathering the moisture he finds there as she watches him--haunted, abashed. 

She didn’t even realize she'd started crying. The pain of the needles had distracted her from her own physical reactions to their insertion. Startled, she raises her head and meets his eyes, vivid jewels in their dingy surroundings, as he wipes her collected tear onto his lower lash line.

Juniper is frozen, unsure of how to handle the contact. She wills herself to calmness. It half-works. His touch is too velvet, too confusing. Part of her wants to lean into it, if only to remember what softness between two people can feel like again.

Her leg is screaming and her mother is saying _Why would I want to talk about something I will never be able to forget_ and she wants to say _I understand now, mom, I know I know_ and she hopes desperately that Peaches is somewhere out in the woods sleeping with her big, perfect head resting on her big, perfect paws. 

She's sitting in a room with thumbtacks sticking out of her, fighting not to relish the rare gift of non-violent touch from the man who put them there. 

They are in a war and June is a prisoner and she's calmer but crying from their session and he attends to her like it is a privilege to offer this brief comfort. She wishes she'd kept her mouth shut.

 _You don't look like you're in pain_ , she'd said.

And he keeps doing it, softly pilfering her tears and adding them to his face, until his cheeks are as wet as hers.


End file.
